The day Google Talk stopped being perfect

I’ve been called an Android fanboy before, and really that’s just not true. I am a Google fanboy, and a rather significant one at that. I’ve been using Gmail since invites were cool, and I’ve found a use for almost every single thing they have triend to bolt onto their continually growing repertoire. Since moving to Android, Google Talk has been a staple in my day to day. 95% of the people I chat with on a daily basis are on there, and the way Gmail and Android sync Google Talk allows me to seamlessly jump from device to device during a conversation. Plus with Google Talk I have never once gotten any spam. Rather, I didn’t until today. Today, is the day that Google Talk stopped being perfect.

MSN Messenger, AIM, Y! IM, they’ve all got the same problem. It never, ever, takes more than a few minutes of being logged in before I get random buddy requests, spam popups, or messages from friends with infected machines. It became so frustrating that I had switched to an all in one client with features stripped out just to make it easier to block and flag and close windows. When more of my friends moved to Gmail, I eventually just stopped signing in to those messengers, and before long I was a one messenger kind of guy.

Last night I got a message request from a gTalk user I didn’t recognize. I had recently joined a new LinkedIn group, and didn’t think anything of tapping the accept button, ready to meet someone new. What I got was a blurb of text and a link that immediately offered my Yahoo! Messenger flashbacks. I didn’t think much of it, blocked the user, and moved on with my day, right up until I wasn’t the only one with the problem.

Within minutes my Twitter feed was filled with dozens of other users with the exact same, one time spam. Further research revealed that it wasn’t a single username, but multiple accounts performing the spam attack. Everyone that I spoke to had the same issue, within minutes of my message. Since then there’s been no other random messages, and no one else that I have found has had the same issue. It was gone just as quickly as it arrived.

Was this a security issue? Were our usernames discovered by a breach on Google’s end, or just scraped from services like LinkedIn? At the moment, there’ s no response from Google about it, and realistically it’s a small thing when you look at what actually happened. The problem as I see it come from the possibility of it getting worse. Will Google Talk eventually end up like Yahoo! or MSN Messenger in regards to spam, or have we seen the last of the Google Talk IM SpamBots?